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SciFi Author (and Byte Columnist) Jerry Pournelle Has Died (jerrypournelle.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader BinBoy writes: Science fiction author and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle has died according to a statement by his son Alex posted to Jerry's web site. A well-wishing page has been set up for visitor's to post their thoughts and memories of Mr. Pournelle.
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."
--He was a major contributor to the "great fiction" genre. He will be missed.
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I used to think he was intelligent and thoughtful capable of cutting through the crap, yet sadly his last "post" exemplifies all that I later found mistaken and flawed in his approach.
Maybe he isn't quite as much of a flaming ideologue as some of the die-hards here, but it still reeks of a bias, a sneering condescending disdain for the liberals that he blames for all the problems of the world.
All supported with a litany of aphorisms to recite until they are ingrained into your very soul.
Sad to lose such a man, but we lost him to his own bitterness many years ago.
Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).
One of his largest accomplishments was being on the President's Space Council where he was one of the backers and political supporters of the DC-X. He personally got into the lobbying effort to get funding for that project through Congress... something that as a project developed many of the theories and ideas for VTOL orbital spacecraft. Without the DC-X it is unlikely that SpaceX would have been able to their their Falcon 9 to land the way it did.
His largest political failure was a proposed lunar exploration prize program similar to the X-Prize but on a larger scale. He got the Republican House leadership (including the then-speaker Newt Gingrich) to accept his idea of basically appropriating $10 billion toward the first three companies that would successfully send and return astronauts to the Moon in the 1990's. After getting the House leadership on board including the minority ranking members (Democrats) of the Science and Space committees, Newt got into his own political mess that ended up killing the whole idea. I can only imagine what might have been had that proposal actually gone forward.
Mr. Pournelle knew Dan Quayle too (through the Space Council), but he pretty much dropped out of politics in such a direct manner after Bill Clinton was elected except through commentary like I mentioned above.
It could be argued that Jerry Pournelle also pioneered the idea of a blog on the web and was one of the first to do that where he entered some of his first entries as hand written HTML.... definitely doing that well before the word itself was coined. He did it as a way to continue his Chaos Manner series even post Byte, but went in different directions as well.
SciAm turned to crap in the early '00s, when they went full-force with the "climate change" memes. ...
Byte only went as far to make me not care, SciAm went much farther by going out of their way to push a left-wing agenda.
SciAm talking about global warming, something that about 97 percent of climate scientists agree is real and largely caused by humans, is entirely appropriate for a science magazine and has nothing to do with left or right wing politics.
This is rather bizarre. BASIC was never intended as a development language, but rather as a sort of hybrid-simplified COBOL/Fortran to be used to introduce people to computing concepts. Yes, over the years, that ease of learning and use gave it a certain edge, not to mention that MS's version of BASIC ended up on most microcomputers in the 1970s and 1980s.
C, on the other hand, was developed specifically as a mid-level language that could be used to develop both system-level and user-level software, but in particular the former. It was designed to build kernels, drivers, and heck, even other compilers. It's strength in being much more low level are the reason it became dominant. It was always intended as a production language, and its association with Unix both in kernel and userland development gave it that edge. It was intended for things BASIC never was.
BASIC gained a good deal of its modern capabilities by introducing concepts like procedural and ultimately OOP programming, either from C/C++ or from Pascal (which, really, always was a far better learning language). I did work in QuickBASIC in the 1990s, and attached to a compiler that could import C libraries, it became a fairly powerful language, but that certainly wasn't the BASIC Pournelle was familiar in the 1980s, and I'd argue that the structured BASIC variants that arose in the late 80s and early 90s were more like weakly-typed PASCAL variants than traditional BASIC. Traditional BASIC really isn't a very good language at all, and this is coming from someone who started programming in the MS-BASIC variants found in Radio Shack and Commodore computers. Developing large complex programs in those dialects was horrible, and languages like C and Pascal was like a revelation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.